Totally Awesome But Useless Floppy RAID

To recap, RAID is basically a way of linking drives together, either to improve the disk read/write speed of a computer, provide a data backup that immediately kicks in upon failure, or a combination of both. And yes, most RAID setups involve the use of hard drives, with some enthusiasts opting to use solid-state drives.

Courtesy of Daniel Blade Olson

But Daniel Blade Olson is on the fringe, creating his own RAID array on Mac OS X with five 3.5″ flopppy disk drives, five floppy disks, one generic USB hub, and one 1995 iMac G3. Obviously a useless achievement, since the total available space provided by the setup was around 4.22 megabytes:

Now I know this is now just a 4.22 MB drive (acutally it is 3.9MB of usable disk space when mounted). I also understand that carrying 5 USB floppy drives around is not exactly portable, but there is something special and amazing about the speed of this floppy cluster. It is really cool when you access the drives the way they flash each light and spin in no particular order that I can discern. It is of course faster than a standard single drive. I was able to transfer “DEVO Uncontrolable Urge.mp3″ which is 3.6 MB in 32 seconds. Which is pretty good I think.